Anchors Too Heavy For My Heart
by nothing-rhymes-with-ianto
Summary: She can't let anything go, not if she's going to remember them. Musichetta post-battle.


_I guess this can be read as either canon 'verse or modern AU. I don't really care. They both work._

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She doesn't clean like she used to. When she cleaned, she would laugh and sing and dust every corner of the flat and pick up the insane mess that three people under one roof tended to make, so that everything was in its proper place and everyone was comfortable again. She doesn't clean like that anymore. She can't.

Instead, she cleans around things. She tries not to move the stuff sitting around the flat, most of the time. Clothes are still under the bed, the dresser and bedside tables are still cluttered with books and trinkets. There's a wooden model schooner in the hallway that Bossuet acquired somehow and they had never decided where to put it, so it stayed in the way in the hall. Joly's medical charts are still scattered all over his desk, and his slippers still sit in the corner where he'd kicked them off one morning. A silly message is still pinned to the cushion on the sofa. She leaves everything where it was. It's not out of denial or anything. She's perfectly, acutely aware of their absence in her life. She doesn't need anyone to tell her they're gone; there are two pieces of her heart and her life that have disappeared. There's nothing more obvious to her than the fact that they're not here.

One morning, she finds Joly's glasses hiding behind a stack of cookbooks in the kitchen ("Oh, where have they got to again? I'm always losing those things. I'll end up going blind by the time I'm thirty if I keep having to squint when I read!") and cradles them in her fingers. They're dirty and smudged with fingerprints from Bossuet snatching them off to bestow Joly's eyelids with kisses as he was wont to do in the evenings after work. She holds them up to the light streaming through the window and tries to imagine Joly's eyes behind them, smiling affectionately at her as he explains some obscure medical ailment he's afraid he might have now that he's learned of it. Her imagination doesn't do him justice, she knows. Already, she has forgotten the exact shade of his eyes, the way they simultaneously glinted with mirth and worry, the way he looked at her and looked at Bossuet with affection and wonder. She places the glasses on the windowsill, where she can see them, where he used to lean against the counter and watch her as she cooked.

There are bits of them all over the flat. She can't bear to part with anything.

At first, her friends had showed up at the flat with food and hugs and tears and she had fallen into their arms and wept. But their attempt at comfort did nothing to alleviate the grief, and she began to keep them at bay. Their acknowledgement of the loss just made the heartache worse. She can't say things are any better.

It's been months, and the grief is still as sharp and aching as it had been when she had first heard the news. She still wakes up expecting warmth on either side of her, Joly's body pressed to her front, his arms between them, Bossuet pressed to her back with his lips against the back of her neck and one arm reaching over to Joly. Instead, she is alone in a bed meant for three, her bare feet sticking out of the end of the duvet, cold and lonely where she'd once been able to warm them against familiar skin. She still screams out her sorrow into the pillow each morning. She still bathes alone and runs a cloth over her body, imagining it's one of her lovers washing her clean.

There's a room she rarely goes into. They had jokingly called it their "study", but it was more of a storage room for all the things they didn't know what to do with. It's full of medical diagrams, law school textbooks, silly pieces of art and trinkets from various places, clothes that were only good for specific occasions, keepsakes and souvenirs from various events (like the cluster of six bouquets all dried up and shoved in one vase from their first anniversary, when they'd all gotten each other individual bunches of flowers, laughed for a good half hour at their circumstance, then spent the rest of the day in bed, savouring each other), and other silly things that don't belong anywhere else. She doesn't go in it because it _smells_ like them, like the two of them and not the three of them or just her and she doesn't want that to go away, not ever. Sometimes she opens the door just a crack and presses her face into the space between the wood and breathes in, so deep, and wishes there was some way to bottle the scent. An ache blooms in her chest and she can't tell if it's grief or nostalgia or a strange, painful sort of loving joy.

Six months on, she's groping her way through the flat in the dark to get a glass of water and she trips over Bossuet's _stupid_ ship, stumbling down to the floor and scraping up her knee. She bites back a gasp, but it still comes out loud in the darkness. There's no reaction from anywhere in the flat, and the silence of the night is thick with the lack of extra breaths and voices. Joly should be running out here to fuss over her and make her wash her knee and make overly certain that she is _fine_, just fine. Bossuet should be stumbling in behind him, stubbing his toe on the ship and laughing that his bad luck means he's keeping her company. She should be kissing Joly's forehead as he bends to tend to her, laughing into his hair at Bossuet's bald head glinting in the moonlight as he cheerfully bemoans his fortune. But everything is silent and cold and she's shivering in her nightgown and the floor is hard and she doesn't even remember where Bossuet got the model schooner in the first place and that thought breaks something inside of her and suddenly she's curled against the wall as sobs wrack her body.

She's losing them. She can feel it. The clothes in the bedroom smell like her instead of them. She can't remember the joyfully sarcastic way that Bossuet laughed at himself whenever misfortune struck him, or the feeling of Joly's hands in her hair as he pretended to "check for fever" even though she knew he was just making up excuses to touch her. She can't remember the feeling of their lips on hers, or the way the three of them fit together at night. There are so many little pieces of them that are missing, that have fallen away from her and it makes her ache. She's been rubbed raw like her knee, and she cries until she's spent and there's nothing left but a hollowness, and then she remains on the floor, staring at the little wooden model until the sky lightens and the sun is streaming through the window to throw its light across her.

It's morning, and nothing is any clearer or brighter. She's cried herself dry, but she doesn't feel better the way people in books always seem to when they've sobbed up six months of grief. She stays on the floor, her breath still hitching and catching slightly. It feels like she's been scraped up all over, and someone has poured lemon juice across her. She stings, and underneath that, aches with the throbbing persistence of a migraine, the lost parts of her nostalgia making tears and spaces that pulse with the absence.

Her head feels stuffed and heavy, and she stumbles upright and wobbles back to the bedroom. The bed looks so big she'll drown in it, but she crawls under the sheets anyway and tries to pretend it doesn't feel as empty as it does. For a moment, she thinks she catches a whiff of Bossuet's scent on the pillow, but she presses her face against it and breathes in and it only smells like her. Her thoughts feel muffled by the swollen sinuses and dehydration from her tears and creeping exhaustion and she can feel everything drifting away.

Somehow, for just a second, it feels like a warm familiar body is pressed against her back, breath at her ear, then the sensation is gone. She's almost too spent to feel bereft, but she swallows back the convulsive tears. Her throat is dry and for a moment, she wishes Joly was there to get her a glass of water.


End file.
